Otto Porter's path is uncommon, and so is his success

• Otto Porter, a star sophomore for the Georgetown men's basketball team, didn't play AAU basketball
• Porter comes from a family that has excelled in Missouri small-school prep sports for years
• Porter is a highly regarded NBA prospect as a small forward

HAYWOOD CITY, Mo. — The two basketball hoops stand at different heights a little too close to one another, the uneven concrete cracked beneath each one and the net nearly ripped off one of the rims.

All that's left now are the remnants of a basketball court outside Otto Porter Jr.'s late grandmother's home.

Here, just a few feet from the gravel road in a town of 206, is where Georgetown's star sophomore became a basketball player.

"That's where the younger kids would play," says Otto, who would sometimes spend weekends at his grandmother's house just so he could play a bit longer. "I have a lot of cousins, so that's where we'd have our battles."

"Grandma loved it," Elnora Porter, Otto's mother, says. "She'd just cook and watch them play basketball."

Now, everyone's watching Otto. His Hoyas beat then-No. 13 UCLA and took No. 1 Indiana to overtime two weeks ago, and Otto himself has averaged nearly a double-double in games he's played so far this season. This year's Georgetown team entered the season unranked, but it didn't take long to change that perception. In that way, these Hoyas are a lot like Otto himself.

Rather than seek the sneakers and exposure offered by AAU teams, Otto played with his cousins at his grandma's court. When he was in high school, he scrimmaged against his father and uncles, learning how to fight for rebounds and that there's no such thing as a foul to bail you out.

Otto didn't take the path traveled by most elite basketball players, though their end destination — the NBA — might be the same.

***

Growing up, the boy nicknamed Bubba had no choice but to play the sport of his parents, uncles and aunts. Some kids run track or play baseball around here, but not many. Nothing compares to basketball.

It takes just one trip to the local high school to understand that. The glass case outside the new Scott County Central gym is nearly overflowing with trophies, ceremoniously clipped nets and plaques. Next to all those trophies in the glass case hangs a retired jersey: No. 35, Otto Porter Sr.

Inside the gym, banners commemorating each of the 16 boys and seven girls' state championship teams hang above the bleachers. If you look closely, you see a lot of familiar names. There's Otto's dad on the first banner from 1976. There's his mother listed under her maiden name, Elnora Timmons. Names of their sisters and brothers mark the banners, too. Otto himself is up there three times – 2009, 2010 and 2011.

"There's a Porter or Timmons up there (every year), pretty much," Otto Sr. says as he plays tour guide in the gym, stopping to pause in front of his son's banners.

A lot of Porters live in the three towns that feed into Scott County Central: Morley (population: 697), Vanduser (population: 267) and the smallest of all, Haywood City (206).

Otto Sr. moved his family to Morley before Otto entered high school just so his son could attend Scott County Central and play alongside his cousins. Otto Sr. even called up his old high coach, Ronnie Cookson, for a favor.

"Otto Jr. came along," says Cookson, who had retired in 1995 after winning 12 state titles. "Otto Sr. came by and asked me to come back and stay till Otto Jr. graduated. So that's what I did. … His dad was probably the best player I ever coached – until he came along."

If anyone knows the pressure of living with the Porter name, it's Otto Jr.

"It was always brought up at the dinner table," he says. "It was always going to be something. … When I was a little kid, people were asking me, 'Are you going to be like your dad or your mom?' "

***

Otto Sr. has six brothers, Elnora has five. On Wednesday nights and Sundays, Otto Sr. and some of Otto's uncles head over to the high school gym. Otto Sr. lets them in with his own key, and they play.

"It's like war out there," Otto Sr. says. "At the end of the day it's a game. But when we're out there playing, it's serious business.That's just the way we've always been. … It's a teaching environment, and you get a chance to work on your game while playing with veteran guys who know the game."

Otto and his cousins joined the games around the same time they entered high school.

"You have to go through levels," Otto says. "Play with your cousins first. Once we got older, all our cousins played with our dads."

Once Otto started playing with them, he started to learn how fundamentally sound he had to be to compete against men who were bigger and stronger. He learned to anticipate the next play before it happened.

"That's where I gained most of (my mental toughness) from," Porter says. "If I get fouled by them, I have to toughen up and just play through it."

Georgetown coach John Thompson III noticed that during Otto's first season in Washington, too.

"I've said many times that he was the most prepared freshman that I've had," Thompson says. "That relates as much to his mentality as it does to his physical tools and his physical readiness. He understood that he had to compete. He understood nothing was going to be handed to him. He understood that you have to participate and be good in every aspect of the game.

"That mental toughness that he brought from days and months and years of getting beat up and pushed around by his uncles and father and family made him ready to compete. He was ready to compete at this level."

The way Otto Sr. sees it, it's the opposite of what many of Otto's peers experienced. Other high-major basketball players may grow up with everyone around them telling them how talented they are.

Not Otto. His father liked to point out his mistakes and areas for improvement – and he still calls after Georgetown games to critique his son's play, even when he posts double-doubles. His mother is the source of comfort, reassuring Otto that he has indeed played well those times when his father is admittedly overbearing.

"He's never been babied," Otto Sr. says. "He's never been put up on a pedestal. He's never taken the attitude that, 'It's about me.' "

***

Otto is an outlier from the elite youth basketball establishment. These days, scholarship offers flow to kids as young as 12 or 13. Choosing AAU teams is as easy as plucking a pair of sneakers off the shelf, and almost all talented American teenagers play the circuit.

"That's very rare for a kid not to play AAU basketball," says Scout.com recruiting analyst Evan Daniels. "Especially one of that caliber. … It was certainly a different recruitment, one we don't see a lot.

"Otto Porter did it his way."

Even now, as he's learned just how unique that was, Otto has no regrets about skipping the circuit.

"Even though I had my ups and downs, I just wanted to continue to work on my game and be around home to help my mom and my dad," Otto says. "I'm definitely glad to have not played AAU."

Otto Sr. fielded plenty of calls from AAU coaches, trying to convince him that his son should play for their teams. He didn't budge.

"A lot of people make a big issue of the fact that he didn't play AAU ball," says Otto Sr., who now gets calls about his 14-year-old son, Jeffrey. "I guess I'm coming to the realization now that that's just one of the things you have to do now, according to what everyone else, the 'basketball people' say.

"My thought process was … I'm going to expose him to more than he's ever going to be exposed to playing on the AAU circuit. Other than the publicity – that was the only thing that Bubba didn't get. … I always told him, if you're a ballplayer, they'll find you. If you can play, they'll find you."

Instead of AAU, Otto Sr. and other parents in the area organized informal games between kids as young as third grade in surrounding towns. Otto's team would drive around the state playing these games, and by the time he reached high school, he'd played with most of his Scott County Central teammates for half his life.

During the summers in high school, the same group of kids would continue to practice together. Otto Sr. also would put his son through skill workouts. And, of course, the younger Porter would play with his family a few times a week, too.

Otto won three Class 1-A state championships (the classification for Missouri's smallest schools) at Scott County Central, and in two of those seasons, Otto was named the conference player of the year. His junior year, Otto pulled down 35 rebounds in the state championship game, breaking his father's record of 25 from 1976.

"I don't think he necessarily fell through the cracks," Thompson says. "At the end of the day, he's down to Georgetown, Kansas and Missouri with a lot of other people wanting to get in.

"Simply the fact that he didn't play AAU and that's where a majority of the stories and the rankings come from, that explains that."

***

Otto's mother cried nearly every day when Otto first left home. And despite his own initial struggle while adapting to city life nearly 850 miles from home, Otto grew up.

He's still the same homebody who likes to hang around the house and gobble up his mother's cooking when he's back in Missouri. He doesn't do much besides eating, sleeping and playing basketball in general, his parents say.

But in his second season of college basketball, Otto is changing.

"He definitely seems mature beyond his years," says Lehigh guard C.J. McCollum, who met Otto this summer at skills camps. "He's seen a lot in his first year. Having John Thompson as your coach, I'm sure that was very influential in his maturation process."

Georgetown teammates say they also expect Porter, who averaged 9.7 points and 6.8 rebounds a game last season, to carry more of the team's scoring load this season.

"He's gotten a lot better in a lot of different ways, which is scary because he was kind of a jack-of-all-trades last season," forward Nate Lubick says. "I think he's ready to have a big year for us, and we're going to need to have him have a big year.

"One thing that Otto has gotten better at is controlling the tempo of the game, which is something that you usually only hear with point guards."

One month into the 2012-13 season, Otto has put on some eye-popping performances. He posted a double-double in the Hoyas' upset of No. 13 UCLA. Against top-ranked Indiana, Otto scored 12 of his 15 points in the second half, including a game-tying layup with 4.6 seconds remaining to force overtime.

Through four starts, Porter has averaged 14.5 points, nine rebounds and nearly three blocked shots. DraftExpress.com's Jonathan Givony said Otto can be a first-round pick in June's NBA Draft.

"I really like his length," Givony says. "He's got good size for a small forward and really long arms. He's got a great feel for the game. He can really pass the ball. He's an unselfish guy, a team player. He's got some things to work on … (but) he's an upside guy right now."

The Porters say they aren't worrying about Otto's draft prospects now; they'll sit down and figure all that out at the end of the season. They'l do it their way, just like always.

Otto's path to the pros is not conventional. But it looks like it just might work.